To Kill Iraq

May 2003 (updated)

In
October 2002, after several days of full-dress debate in the House and
Senate, the US Congress fell into line behind almost-elected president
George W. Bush, giving him a mandate to launch a massive military assault
against the already battered nation of Iraq. The discourse in Congress
was marked by its usual cowardice. Even many of the senators and representatives
who voted against the president's resolution did so on the narrowest
procedural grounds, taking pains to tell how they too detested Saddam
Hussein, how they agreed with the president on many points, how something
needed to be done about Iraq but not just yet, not quite in this way.
So it is with Congress: so much political discourse in so narrow a political
space. Few of the members dared to question the unexamined assumptions
about US virtue, and the imperial right of US leaders to decide which
nations shall live and which shall die. Few, if any, pointed to the
continual bloody stream of war crimes committed by a succession of arrogant
US administrations in blatant violation of human rights and international
law.

Pretexts
for War

Bush
and other members of his administration gave varied and unpersuasive
reasons
to justify the “war”—actually a one-sided massacre—against
Iraq. They claimed it was necessary to insure the safety and security
of the
Middle East and of the United States itself, for Iraq was developing
weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear missiles. But as of
1998,
UN inspection teams determined that Iraq had no such nuclear capability
and actually had been in compliance with yearly disarmament inspections.
And, as of February 2003, UN inspection teams found little to support
Bush’s case for aggression, despite Colin Powell's slide-show shenanigans
before the United Nations.

As for
the fact that Iraq once had factories that produced chemical and bacteriological
weapons, whose fault was that? It was the United States that supplied
such things to Saddam. This is one of several key facts about past US-Iraq
relations that the corporate media have consistently suppressed. In
any case, according to UN inspection reports, Iraq’s C&B warfare capability
has been dismantled. Still the Bushites keep talking about Iraq’s dangerous
“potential.” As reported by the Associated Press (2 November 2002),
Undersecretary of State John Bolton claimed that “Iraq would be able
to develop a nuclear weapon within a year if it gets the right technology.”
If it gets the right technology? The truistic nature of this assertion
has gone unnoticed. Djibouti, Qatar, and New Jersey would be able to
develop nuclear weapons if they got “the right technology.”

Through
September and October of 2002, the White House made it clear that Iraq
would be attacked if it had weapons of mass destruction. Then in November
2002, Bush announced he would attack if Saddam denied that he
had weapons of mass destruction. So if the Iraqis admit having such
weapons, they will be bombed; and if they deny having them, they still
will be bombed—whether they have them or not.

The Bushites
also charged Iraq with allowing al Qaeda terrorists to operate within
its territory. But US intelligence sources themselves let it be known
that the Iraqi government was not connected to Islamic terrorist organizations.
In closed sessions with a House committee, when administration officials
were repeatedly asked whether they had information of an imminent terrorist
threat from Saddam against US citizens, they stated unequivocally that
they had no such evidence (San Francisco Chronicle, 20 September
2002). Truth be told, the Bush family has closer ties to the bin Laden
family than does Saddam Hussein. No mention is made of how US leaders
themselves have waged death squad terrorist campaigns in scores of countries,
and how they have allowed terrorists to train and operate within our
own territory, including a mass murderer like Orlando Bosch. Convicted
of blowing up a Cuban airliner, Bosch walks free in Miami.

Bush and
company seized upon yet another pretext for war: Saddam has committed
war crimes and acts of aggression, including the war against Iran and
the massacre of Kurds. But the Pentagon’s own study found that the gassing
of Kurds at Halabja was committed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis (New
York Times, 24 January 2003). Another seldom mentioned fact: US
leaders gave Iraq encouragement and military support in its war against
Iran. And if war crimes and aggression are the issue, there are the
US invasions of Grenada and Panama to consider, and the US-sponsored
wars of attrition against civilian targets in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and scores of other places, leaving
hundreds of thousands dead. There is no communist state or “rogue nation”
that has such a horrific record of military aggression against other
countries over the last two decades.

With
all the various pretexts for war ringing hollow, the Bushites resorted
to
the final indictment: Saddam was a dictator. The United States stood
for democracy and human rights. It followed that US leaders were
obliged
to use force and violence to effect “regime change” in Iraq. Again,
we might raise questions. There is no denying that Saddam is a dictator,
but how did he and his crew ever come to power? Saddam’s conservative
wing of the Ba’ath party was backed by the CIA. They were enlisted
to
destroy the Iraqi popular revolution and slaughter every democrat,
left-progressive, and communist they could get hold of, which indeed
they did, including
the progressive wing of the Ba’ath party itself—another fact that
US media have let slide down the memory hole. Saddam was Washington's
poster boy until the end of the Cold War.

So why
has George II, like his daddy, targeted Iraq? When individuals keep
providing new and different explanations to justify a particular action,
they most likely are lying. So with political leaders and policymakers.
Having seen that the pretexts given by the White House to justify war
are palpably false, some people conclude that the administration is
befuddled or even “deranged.” But just because they are trying to mislead
and confuse the public does not perforce mean they themselves are misled
and confused. Rather it might be that they have reasons which they prefer
not to see publicized and debated, for then it would become evident
that US policies of the kind leveled against Iraq advance the interests
of the rich and powerful at much cost to the American people and every
other people on the face of the earth. Here I think are the real reasons
for the US aggression against Iraq.

Global
Politico-Economic Supremacy

A central
US goal, as enunciated by the little Dr. Strangeloves who inhabit
the
upper echelons of policymaking in the Bush administration, is to perpetuate
US global supremacy. The objective is not just power for its own
sake
but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize
and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist
upon the backs of peoples everywhere-including the people of North
America—the blessings of an untrammeled “free market” corporate
capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land,
labor, capital,
technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing
capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these
things
should be used primarily for the communal benefit and socio-economic
development of the many.

The goal
is to insure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such,
but the supremacy of US global capitalism by preventing the emergence
of any other potentially competing superpower or, for that matter, any
potentially competing regional power. Iraq is a case in point.
Some nations in the Middle East have oil but no water; others have water
but no oil. Iraq is the only one with plenty of both, along with a good
agricultural base-although much of its fertile land is now much contaminated
by the depleted uranium dropped upon it during the 1991 Gulf War bombings.

In earlier
times, Iraq’s oil was completely owned by US, British, and other Western
companies. In 1958 there was a popular revolution in Iraq. Ten years
later, the rightwing of the Ba’ath party took power, with Saddam Hussein
serving as point man for the CIA. His assignment was to undo the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, as I have already noted. But instead of acting as a compradore
collaborator to Western investors in the style of Nicaragua’s Somoza,
Chile’s Pinochet, Peru’s Fujimora, and numerous others, Saddam and his
cohorts nationalized the Iraqi oil industry in 1972, ejected the Western
profiteers, and pursued policies of public development and economic
nationalism. By 1990, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the
Middle East (which may not be saying all that much). It was evident
that the US had failed to rollback the gains of the 1958 revolution.
But the awful destruction delivered upon Iraq both by the Gulf War and
the subsequent decade of intermittent bombings and severe economic sanctions
did achieve a kind of counterrevolutionary rollback from afar.

Soon after
the overthrow of the Soviet Union, US leaders decided that Third World
development no longer needed to be tolerated. Just as Yugoslavia served
as a “bad” example in Europe, so Iraq served as a bad example to other
nations in the Middle East. The last thing the plutocrats in Washington
want in that region is independent, self-defining developing nations
that wish to control their own land, labor, and natural resources.

US economic
and military power has been repeatedly used to suppress competing
systems.
Self-defining countries like Cuba, Iraq, and Yugoslavia are targeted.
Consider Yugoslavia. It showed no desire to become part of the European
Union and absolutely no interest in joining NATO. It had an economy
that had many problems but was still relatively prosperous, with
some
80 percent of it publicly owned. (Whether this qualified Yugoslavia
as a socialist country in the eyes of all leftists is not
the question. It was all too socialist for US policymakers.)
The wars of secession and attrition waged against Yugoslavia—all
in the
name of human rights and democracy—destroyed that country’s economic
infrastructure and fractured it into a cluster of poor, powerless,
right-wing
mini-republics, whose economies are being privatized, deregulated,
deindustrialized, and opened to Western corporate penetration on
terms that are completely
favorable to the investors. We see this happening most recently in
Serbia. The US corporate media have ignored Serbia since Milosevic
was arrested
and the democratically elected parliament-with a first-time Socialist
Party majority-was overthrown. Under the new “pro-West” government,
everything in Serbia is now being privatized at garage sale prices.
Human service, jobs, and pension funds are disappearing. Unemployment,
inflation, and poverty are skyrocketing, as is crime, hunger,
homelessness,
prostitution, and suicide.

Judging
from what has been happening in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia,
Panama,
Grenada, and elsewhere—we can anticipate that the same thing is in
store for Iraq following a US occupation. An Iraqi puppet government
will be put in place, headed by someone every bit as subservient to
the White House as Tony Blair. The Iraqi state-owned media will
become
“free and independent” by being handed over to rich conservative private
corporations. Anything even remotely critical of US foreign policy
and
free market capitalism will be deprived of an effective platform. Conservative
political parties, heavily financed by US sources, will outspend any
leftist groupings that might emerge. On this steeply unleveled playing
field, US advisors will conduct US-style “democratic elections,” perhaps
replicating the admirable results produced in Florida and elsewhere.
Just about everything in the Iraqi economy will be privatized at giveaway
prices. Poverty and underemployment, already high, will climb precipitously.
So will the Iraqi national debt, as international loans are floated
in order to help the Iraqis pay for their own victimization. Public
services will dwindle to nothing, and Iraq will suffer even more misery
than it does today. We are being asked to believe that the Iraqi
people
are willing to endure another battering by US military forces in order
to reach this free-market paradise.

Natural
Resource Grab

Another
reason for targeting Iraq can be summed up in one word: oil. Along with
maintaining the overall global system of expropriation, US leaders are
interested in more immediate old-time colonial plunder. The present
White House leadership is composed of oil men who are both sorely tempted
and threatened by Iraq's oil reserve, one of the largest in the world.
With 113 billion barrels at $35 a barrel, Iraq's supply comes to almost
$4 trillion dollars. But not a drop of it belongs to the US oil
cartel; it is all state owned. Baghdad has offered exploratory concessions
to France, China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia. But with a US
takeover of Iraq and a new puppet regime in place, all these agreements
may be subject to cancellation. We may soon witness the biggest oil
grab in the history of Third World colonialism by US oil companies aided
and abetted by the US government.

One thing
that US leaders were interested in doing with Iraqi oil—given the
glut and slumping price of crude during the late 1990s—was keep it
off the market for awhile. As the London Financial Times (24
February 1998) reported, oil prices fell sharply because the agreement
between the United Nations and Iraq that would allow Baghdad to sell
oil on the world market “could lead to much larger volumes of Iraqi
crude oil competing for market shares.” The San Francisco Chronicle
(22 February 1998) headlined its story “IRAQ’S OIL POSES THREAT TO
THE WEST.’ In fact, Iraqi crude posed no threat to “the West” only
to Western oil investors. If Iraq were able to reenter the international
oil market,
the Chronicle reported, “it would devalue British North Sea
oil, undermine American oil production and—much more important—it
would
destroy the huge profits which the United States [read, US oil companies]
stands to gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production,
especially in Azerbajian.” Direct control and ownership of Iraqi oil
will be the surest way to keep it off the world market when the price
is not right, and the surest way to profit from its sale when oil prices
rise substantially—as they have since the 1990s.

Domestic
Political Gains

War and
violence have been good to George W. Bush. As of September 10, 2001,
his approval ratings were sagging woefully. Then came the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, swiftly followed by the newly
trumpeted war against terrorism and the massive bombing and invasion
of Afghanistan. Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed. But soon came the
corporate scandals of 2002: Enron, WorldCom, and even more perilously
Harken and Halliburton. By July, both the president and vice-president
were implicated in fraudulent corporate accounting practices, making
false claims of profit to pump up stock values, followed by heavy insider
selling just before the stock was revealed to be nearly worthless and
collapsed in price. By September, the impending war against Iraq blew
this whole issue off the front pages and out of the evening news. Daddy
Bush did the same thing in 1990, sending the savings and loan scandal
into media limbo by waging war against that very same country.

By October
2002, the Republican party, reeling from the scandals and pegged as
the party of corporate favoritism and corruption, now reemerged as the
party of patriotism, national defense, and strong military leadership
to gain control of both houses of Congress, winning elections it should
never have won. Many Americans rallied around the flag, draped as it
was around the president. Some of our compatriots, who are cynical and
suspicious about politicians in everyday affairs, display an almost
child-like unlimited trust and knee-jerk faith when these same politicians
trumpet a need to defend US “national security” against some alien threat,
real or imagined.

War also
distracts the people from their economic problems, the need for decent
housing, schools, and jobs, and a recession that shows no sign of easing.
Since George II took office, the stock market has dropped 34 percent,
unemployment has climbed 35 percent, the federal surplus of $281 billion
is now a deficit of $157 billion (or more), and an additional 1.5 million
people are without health insurance, bringing the total to 41 million.
War has been good for the conservative agenda in general, providing
record military spending, greater profits for the defense industry,
and a deficit spending spree that further enriches the creditor class
at the taxpayer's expense, and is used to justify more cuts in domestic
human services.

War also
becomes an excuse to further circumscribe our civil liberties, such
as they are. The siege psychology fostered by perpetual war makes dissent
all that much more “unpatriotic.” Under newly enacted repressive legislation
almost any critical effort against existing policy can be defined as
“giving aid and comfort to terrorism.” Contrary to the established myth
that capitalism fosters democracy, the moneyed class has always opposed
the broadening of popular rights and has always shown itself hostile
to any kind of democratic activism and militancy.

Political
democracy has historically been a weapon used by the people to defend
themselves against the abuses of wealth. So it was in the ancient Greek
and Roman republics and so it remains to this day. Consequently, the
plutocrats wage war not only against the public sector and against the
people's standard of living, but also against the very democratic rights
that the populace utilizes to defend or advance its economic well-being.

Liberal
intellectuals are never happier than when, with patronizing smiles,
they can dilate on the stupidity of George W. Bush. What I have tried
to show is that Bush is neither retarded nor misdirected. Given
his
class perspective and interests, there are compelling reasons to commit
armed aggression against Iraq—and against other countries to come.
It is time we dwelled less upon his malapropisms and more on his rather
effective deceptions and relentless viciousness. Many decent crusaders
have been defeated because of their inability to fully comprehend the
utter depravity of their enemies. The more we know what we are up
against,
the better we can fight it.

Michael
Parenti’s latest books are The Terrorism Trap (City Lights);
To Kill a Nation (Verso): and the 7th edition of Democracy
for the Few (Wadsworth). And most recently, The Assassination
of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, published
by The New Press.